This history is built upon resistance, victimisation, endurance and complicity.

It is a history of Muslim women being victims - both the real and imagined - of sexism, as well as the respondents to sexism.

And this history has led to the current situation and shapes the environment in which all Muslim women operate.

Like women everywhere who encounter sexism, sometimes we quietly accept it because we see responding as futile or even aggravating, sometimes we angrily fight back, demanding our rights and our dignity, and sometimes we quietly work in the background, delicately negotiating the obstacle course of ego and cultural tradition.

I have done all these things, both within and without the Muslim community, and will probably continue to do so until I die.

The grim reality of living in a patriarchal world means your gender is always a ghost that hovers over every situation. Women learn early on, as little girls, that being female is never irrelevant - it always has its consequences.

But in order to understand this in the context of the Muslim community, it is useful to have some sense of the history of Western views of Muslim women, the history of Muslim women fighting sexism with the resources and perspectives available to them within Islam.

Inside the harem

Classical Islamic law affords women the same right and obligation to an education as it does to a male, the right to financial independence (in both earning and spending, including owning property, entering contractual agreements and initiating enterprise), the right to keep her name after marriage, the right to sexual satisfaction from her spouse, the option to use contraception if she desires, the right to divorce, the right to initiate and refuse marriage, the right to be a religious authority equivalent to men, the right to social and political participation, and the right to financial maintenance from her husband, as well as viewing her as a spiritual equal to men. It even states that a woman is not required to serve her husband food or clean his house.

Despite the rights and status that Islam confers upon women, since at least the eighteenth century many in the West have associated Islam with the oppression of women. Much of this belief was fuelled by the Western fascination with "the harem," which "though often prurient, placed a high premium on renditions of the segregated world to which Western men were not permitted entry." This fascination created a lucrative market for "inside the harem" accounts, written by both Western and Middle Eastern women.

Significantly, even in the early 1900s, Muslim women who had lived in the Ottoman Empire were railing against the non-Muslim accounts emerging about harem life for Western audiences. So, for instance, Zeyneb Hanoum (a pen name for Hadidje Zennour), an upper-class Ottoman Turkish Muslim woman, announced "that nine out of every ten books on the harem should be burned" as they were so erroneous. In turn, she wrote her account of the reality of living within a harem to redress that imbalance.

Compare this with the modern avalanche of hand-wringing declamations of the plight of Muslim women, and it soon becomes evident that the phenomenon of publishing misinformation and outright fantasies about Muslim women for eager Western consumption is nothing new.

The negative view of the treatment of Muslim women has persisted over the centuries, though its form has changed somewhat. Muslim women were generally seen as the inverse of the Western ideal of womanhood. Thus, in Victorian times, when Western Christendom championed a puritanical, chaste view of women, the Muslim woman was viewed as the lascivious, sex-hungry temptress. Her veil was seen as a form of enticement, and the harem was viewed as a hotbed of unbridled sexuality. The staged pornographic photos taken of "harem girls" during this time fuelled this perception and were incredibly popular, despite the fact that they were often fakes.

Now that the West prides itself on the freedom of women and its open view towards sexuality, the Muslim woman is seen as oppressed and deprived of autonomy, as little more than the "passive embodiment of exotic suffering" - her veil now restricts her movement and denies her sexuality.

Do Muslim women need to be rescued?

In the Western imagination, the Muslim woman perpetually embodies "the other." The belief that Islam is inherently oppressive towards women has often been coupled with the expressed desire to rescue the Muslim woman, even if against her will. This is well illustrated by Lord Cromer, the British Consul-General to Egypt (1883-1907), who announced back in the late-nineteenth century, "I am here to liberate Muslim women, I am here to liberate them from Islam."

The desire to free Muslim women from Islam, whether they like it or not, is coupled with the belief that the only explanation for Muslim women's adherence to Islam is, as anthropologist Saba Mahmood describes it, a form of "false consciousness or the internalization of patriarchal norms through socialization." In other words, no clear-thinking woman would ever choose Islam as a way of life; it is something imposed upon her by a confused state of mind or lack of exposure to viable alternatives.

Thus, the inevitability of the liberation of Muslim women from Islam is seen as natural, as Muslim women are little more than "pawns in a grand patriarchal plan," and if they are "freed from their bondage" they would "naturally express their instinctual abhorrence for the traditional Islamic mores" that enslave them.

The dubious desire to free the Muslim woman from herself still exists. The most recent incarnation is the Feminist Hawk, as started by writer and psychologist Phyllis Chesler, which openly "advocates the use of force to liberate Muslim women from persecution and burkas [sic]." Its driving principle is the struggle against "islamofascist misogyny."

The idea that Muslim women need rescuing from their woefully sexist predicament is therefore alive and well, if only because there is a complete lack of belief that any woman would be Muslim if given another option. After all, why would they support something that seems to be harmful to them, "especially at a historical moment when these women appear to have more emancipatory possibilities"?

The desire to free Muslim women didn't spring from misplaced paternalism. The "plight" of Muslim women has, however, been used to rationalise invasions into Muslim-majority countries, such as Afghanistan, when, for instance, the then First Lady Laura Bush made the unusual move of taking over her husband's weekly radio address to highlight "the plight of women" in Afghanistan as it "is a matter of deliberate human cruelty carried out by those who seek to intimidate and control." This speech was echoed two days later by Cherie Blair, wife of then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who also spoke publicly and at length about the lack of women's rights in Afghanistan.

These speeches were widely - and rightly - viewed as part of a campaign to bolster support for the invasion of Afghanistan, linking Muslim women's emancipation to the need to bomb the country.

Islam and the struggle against sexism

These negative attitudes towards Muslim women can be understood in the broader context of Islamophobia. This term has existed at least since the 1980s, though some reports date it as early as the 1920s. The pioneering academic engagement with the concept came from the race equality think tank The Runnymede Trust in 1997, who stated that the term is "not ideal, but is recognizably similar to 'xenophobia' and 'Europhobia', and is a useful shorthand way of referring to dread or hatred of Islam - and, therefore, to fear or dislike of all or most Muslims."

So, negative attitudes towards Muslims - and specifically towards Muslim women - are not new phenomena in the Western world, even if the term Islamophobia is arguably less than forty years old. However, several commentators have noted the increase in anti-Muslim, anti-Islamic sentiment in the West, to the extent that "in the global 'West', the racialized 'Muslim Other' has become the pre-eminent 'folk devil' of our time."

There is little doubt that the alleged (mis)treatment of Muslim women in Islam concerns non-Muslims living in the West considerably. A 2005 Gallup Poll of American households found that "gender inequality" was among the top responses American women gave to the open-ended question, "What do you admire least about the Muslim or Islamic world?"

Muslim women are aware, particularly if we wear the hijab, that we are never anonymous, and our existences are never benign. Every action is interpreted as pregnant with patriarchal meaning. When walking along the street with my husband, I know to never dawdle in his wake while window shopping or daydreaming, as falling a step behind is perceived by onlookers not as accidental but an active embodiment of my inferiority to him. When my husband spoke adoringly about me in an acceptance speech for an award he was given, non-Muslim friends later contacted me saying how great it was to hear a Muslim man speaking respectfully about his wife. It was seen as remarkable only because it was not assumed to be the default.

But far from passively waiting around for some external force to liberate them, much less being somehow complicit in their own oppression, Muslim women have actively fought for their rights, both by participating in theological debate and by challenging the sexist status quo since the advent of Islam. Sometimes this struggle was carried out within an explicitly religious framework; other times it was not. However, all are endeavours by Muslim women to fight sexism.

While it would be impossibly ambitious to give a full account of more than 1,400 years of attempts to challenge patriarchy across many homes, villages, cities and countries, I do want to offer a sense - for that is all that it can be, given the richness of the tradition - of some of the more notable efforts on the part of Muslim women.

Contemporaries of and successors to the Prophet Muhammad

Ibn Kathir (d. 774) narrates the story of the woman of the Quraysh tribe who used the Qur'an to argue publicly with 'Umar (the caliph or ruler of the time) only a few years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. 'Umar wanted to cap the value of the mahr, a gift that must be given to a woman for her personal use. The woman criticised his plan using Qur'anic verses to justify her disagreement, and upon hearing her argument, 'Umar rescinded, saying "The woman is right and 'Umar is wrong."

Other reports exist about female companions of the Prophet Muhammad approaching the Prophet to initiate divorce from their husbands, to request education when men were blocking their opportunities, and to complain about domestic violence.

Women contemporaries of the Prophet Muhammad and his immediate successors were also engaged in Qur'anic interpretation, especially on verses pertaining to justice or rights of women. Aisha and Umm Salamah (both wives of the Prophet Muhammad) were recorded as doing so, and around 150 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the mother of al-Shafi' - himself one of the greatest religious scholars in the history of Islam - is recorded to have challenged a judge over his treatment of her while she was in court, basing her argument on a Qur'anic verse specifically referring to women.

Aisha is also known for issuing fatawa on numerous issues, but is especially renowned for giving rulings that reminded people not to view women negatively when there was no religious basis to do so. In one instance, when a rumour was circulating among some Iraqis that a woman and lowly animals passing in front of a praying man would spoil his prayer, she declared:

"Listen, oh people of Iraq. You think that a donkey, a dog, a woman and a cat passing in front of a man praying cuts [ruins] his prayer. You have equated us women with them?! Push away whoever comes in front of you as much as is possible for you. For nothing cuts the prayer."

Another version of this ruling has Aisha criticising the man who was circulating this lie, saying to him, "You have made women like the worst animals!"

Sakina, the Prophet Muhammad's great-granddaughter and a personal favourite of mine, put conditions in her marital contract that would scandalise a modern Muslim community, such as the right to commit nushuz (rebellion, disobedience) against her husband, and that her husband, Zayd, would never go against her will. When Zayd was once foolish enough to do so, she took him to court and in front of the judicial bench shouted at him, "Look as much as you can at me today, because you will never see me again!"

From the medieval to the modern era: Egypt and Iran

Many accounts of Muslim women from the medieval period point to their large numbers in scholarship, trade and positions of influence, including slave women. In a ground-breaking English-language account of traditional female Islamic scholarship, Mohammad Akram Nadwi states there were numerous instances of women teaching hadith classes to students, both male and female, in principal mosques and colleges from the sixth century AH3 on; "issuing fatwas; interpreting the Qur'an; challenging the rulings of qadis; criticising the rulers; preaching to people to reform their ways." These actions were approved and applauded:

"The sheer number of examples from different periods and regions ... establish that the answer to some of the 'If men can, why can't women?' questions is 'Men can and women can too'."

Unfortunately, many Muslim women's endeavours have been lost because they simply were not recorded in written form, but were limited to the oral tradition.

A major shift occurred around the nineteenth century, when Muslim women moved from being the objects of cultural writing to its subjects. It was from the nineteenth century, when women started to write their own journals, form organisations with the explicit rubric of feminism, and record their own histories, that a tangible and cohesive Islamic feminism emerged at a national level in places like Egypt.

It was at this time that both individual and collective activism began to take place, whereas previously it had nearly always occurred individually. Although there are many instances of this activity in places like Morocco, Algeria and Turkey, Egypt and Iran stand out as particularly notable cases.

Far from being a Western import, feminism in Egypt was indigenous. As historian Margot Badran bluntly puts it, "The West is not the patrimonial home of feminism, from which all feminisms derive and against which they must be measured." The written record of Egyptian feminists exists from the late-nineteenth century. Then, in 1909 writer Malak Hifni Nasif published Al-Nisa'iyyat, a compendium of works on women's rights, in Cairo, and in 1923 the Egyptian Feminist Union was formed, headed by activist Huda Sha'rawi. From a young age, Sha'rawi was acutely aware of the limitations her gender placed on her in society, such as keeping her from the education she craved. After observing a female poet who stayed with the family, Sha'rawi realised that "with learning, women could be the equals of men, if not surpass them."

Women's journals also started to be produced in Egypt in the early twentieth century. Nabawiya Musa, a hafiza (someone who has memorised the entire Qur'an) who decided to interpret the Qur'an for herself, published The Magazine of the Young Woman as well as a number of books focussing on the education and employment of women. It was the phenomenal, and very public, professional achievements of Nabawiya that set the precedent for the Egyptian government to award women "equal pay for equal work" years later.

In 1945 the Arab Feminist Union was established and was based in Cairo with Huda Sha'rawi again at the helm. However, this movement was criticised by some of Sha'rawi's contemporaries for being nationalistic and elitist. Shortly thereafter, feminism in Egypt began to grow and change.

Other women, such as philosopher and poet Doria Shafik and Fatma Reshad, led movements and activism, including storming parliament to demand rights for women and hunger strikes to gain women greater political participation in the 1950s, and the controversial text Woman and Sex by Nawal El Saadway was published in the 1970s.

Iranian Muslim women also have a rich tradition of struggling for gender equality. In the nineteenth century, Taherah Qurrat-ul 'Ayn, a learned theologian and public scholar, objected to all forms of the confinement of women and the establishment of distinct male and female gender roles. She is best known for her very public unveiling in 1848, which stunned her community. Her notable feminist contemporaries were women like Bibi Khanum Astarabadi, who declared "all the problems and chaos faced in Iran and by its women were men's doings," and Taj-ul Sultanah, who "criticized oppressive traditions and customs both for retarding Iran's development and for depriving women."

In the twentieth century, women's publications in Iran began to flourish as they did in Egypt, with more than twenty separate women's periodicals in circulation by 1930. After the Islamic Revolution, feminism in Iran was split into secular and Islamic camps and, while the two didn't always agree, they proved they could work together on common projects for a shared goal. By the 1990s Islamic feminism - though not always referred to in such terms - was on the increase in the Muslim diaspora in the West.

Islamic feminism?

It would be wrong, however, to suggest that there has always been a tension, much less a dichotomy, between Muslim women and feminism as such. Explicitly named feminism and feminists have existed in numerous Muslim countries for more than a hundred years, in both secular and religious forms. For quite some time, there have been Muslim women who operated outside a religious framework to fight sexism, and there have been Muslim women who use religion as one of the tools - in many instances, the only tool - in their struggle against the sexism around them. Some utilised the "feminist" label and some did not. But all were engaged in challenging the sexism that they and their sisters faced.

The fight against sexism in the Muslim world is indigenous, and is an endeavour that sprang from the soil of Mecca and Medina at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, and has now grown and spread throughout countless communities around the globe. It's also a fight that Muslim women have been carrying out for themselves, by themselves, against the very real injustices they experience in their varied communities, since the beginning of Islam more than 1,400 years ago.

Obviously not all Muslim women throughout history have had the means or the interest in fighting the sexism under which they lived, just as is the case for non-Muslim women. But it is simply incorrect to assume or argue that Muslim women have been entirely passive victims or, worse, active accomplices in their own oppression. As Roja Fazaeli, a scholar in Islamic civilisation, reminds us, while the term "Islamic feminism" is recent, the act of Muslim women fighting sexism is nothing new.

Susan Carland is a lecturer and researcher at Monash University's National Centre for Australian Studies, and the author of Fighting Hislam: Women, Faith and Sexism, from which this article has been adapted.